Instead, there was a small cloud of people outside the store (Timothy had closed the store ostensibly “to prepare for the grand event” but really to smoke an old doobie he’d found in a drawer). Todd moved past them with the half-embarrassed grace of someone who everybody had come to see but nobody actually knew.

Sara knocked on the glass door and a slightly unsteady Timothy let them in.

“I set you up here,” he said, indicating a small lectern in the middle of the space where the gardening books normally lurked. Four optimistic rows of chairs faced the lectern and to one side was a table with at least three bottles of wine on it.

“That’s perfect,” said Todd. “You’ve done a fantastic job, old pal.”

Timothy, pleased and furious to be called “old pal,” smiled horribly.

“Not at all,” he said. “Well, better cry havoc and let slip the dogs of—whatever!”

He opened the door and the small cloud of people drifted in. Sara took a seat in a chair at the back and smiled up at Todd, who made his way to the lectern to fiddle with his notes. When he looked up a few seconds later, he saw that three of the rows of chairs were full up. Todd smiled back, wanly. He was starting to feel more than a little nervous.

Sara smiled at him as Timothy got up and stood in front of Todd.

“Ladies and gentlemen, good people and fair,” he said, and immediately Todd wanted to grab him by the hair and smash him into the glass window, “welcome to Legolas Books. ’Tis a small thing but all mine own. And tonight,” and now Timothy gestured a little wildly at Todd, “I am honored to share it with a very special guest, someone who I have been privileged to know for many years: Todd Milstead.”

There was some applause, the kind there is when people haven’t actually been served up anything yet but want to be nice. Todd stepped forward, but Timothy wasn’t done yet.

“Todd is known to many of us here as friend, colleague, buddy, acquaintance,” he began, having apparently been at the thesaurus as well as the Mary Jane, “but tonight he is here in a new capacity. One that he has been hiding from us all these many years. That of scribe.”

Todd gripped the lectern and, in his mind, beat Timothy to death with it.

“For tonight a poet walks among us,” said Timothy, an edge in his voice. Then he smiled again, swaying slightly.